My Page: Amy Brouillette

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WIND POWER

Amidst the state’s oil and natural gas drilling surge, some Coloradoans are looking for ways to go greener. The American Wind Energy Association opens a three-day conference in Denver today, an event expected to draw over 4,000 attendees and 200 companies to check out the latest technologies and developments in wind energy.
Green-leaning Colorado residents last year voted for Amendment 37 requiring the state’s utilities, mainly the region’s utility goliath Xcel Energy Corp., to derive 10 percent of its energy from renewable energy sources like wind, hydro, biomass and geothermal by 2015. However loud Colorado voters have spoken in support of cleaner energy, it has hardly quelled the frantic energy-drilling boom along Colorado’s Western Slope. The Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission is on pace for issuing a record-breaking number of drilling permits, about 3,700, this year, the Denver Post’s Theo Stein reported yesterday. The controversial energy bill passed by the U.S. House of Representatives last month could even exempt thousands of new natural-gas wells in Colorado from environmental review, Stein reports. [more]

BORDER PATROL

When news broke earlier this week that the suspect in a Denver police officer’s murder over the weekend is an illegal immigrant, anti-immigration crusader Rep. Tom Tancredo pounced on the chance to stump for his cause, unabashedly parlaying the tragedy into his political pulpit.
While lightening-quick on the draw, Tancredo is a miserable shot, aiming like a drunken cowboy at both Mayor John Hickenlooper and the Denver Police Department for their apparent collaborative failures to act as border patrol agents. The suspect, a Mexican national, had been pulled over in three routine traffic stops, each time producing a valid Mexican driver’s license to the officers or in court, the Denver Post reported yesterday. In a statement released Tuesday, the congressman said Hickenlooper provides sanctuary to illegal immigrants by preventing local law enforcement from handing illegal immigrants over to the feds. The Rocky Mountain News reports the two-decade old policy, which says officers are not responsible for enforcing immigration laws unless a person is arrested for another crime, aims to prevent women from not reporting domestic violence—and not, as Tancredo charges, to provide safe haven for illegal immigrants. [more]

ENERGY WARS

Showing just how frenzied the energy boom on Colorado's mineral-rich Western slope has become, Garfield County leaders this week announced they are backing a plan to allow a Texas-based energy company to drill near the site of an underground nuclear explosion. According to an Associated Press report in today's Daily Camera, Presco Inc. is pushing the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission for a waiver permitting the company to drill within a half-mile buffer zone of the Project Rulison site near Rifle. In 1969, the Atomic Energy Commission (now the Department of Energy) detonated a 40-kiloton nuclear explosion in an 8,000-foot-deep shaft there as part of a government experiment at using nukes for “peaceful� purposes—in this case, to release natural gas reserves locked tightly in the sandstone and shale Mesa Verde formation.
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MOM POWER

It was a carnival-like celebration on the Pearl Street Mall Sunday afternoon as a horde of locals marched to the downtown courthouse walking on stilts, donning clown costumes, wearing tutus, riding skateboards, bikes and roller blades in the fourth annual Mothers Acting Up Mother’s Day Parade.
The group’s message: to mobilize the political strength of mothers to ensure the health, education and safety of the world’s children. Over 100 supporters—moms, dads and kids—gathered at the Boulder Public Library before setting out in a lively procession across Canyon and onto an already bustling Pearl Street, hoisting colorful banners and chanting, “Ain’t no power like the power of the mamma, and the power of the mamma don’t stop.�
Live Congo music played as the crowd swarmed to the courthouse area, where a dozen political groups had set up booths and Wild Oats dished out free cake. Despite the import of the group’s message, organizers managed to keep the mood festive and light. “Mothers don’t want to rally around anger,� Beth Osnes, event organizer and Mothers Acting Up co-founder, told New West at Sunday’s event. Osnes and three other local mothers formed the group four years ago, inspired by anti-war activist Julia Ward Howe who started Mother’s Day in 1870. A Boston-born women’s rights advocate, Howe wrote the Mother's Day Proclamation urging all women and mothers to resist war, which was the original message of Mother’s Day. [more]

CU's Many Scandals

Today’s commencement ceremony at the University of Colorado is momentous for more than just this year’s troupe of spring graduates. For the embattled university, it ends a year of controversy and turmoil that dragged the university into the national spotlight and sent heads rolling — most notably, that of outgoing president Elizabeth Hoffman.

Granted, a sordid football recruitment scandal involving slush funds and prostitutes, followed by Wardgate, is the stuff of media dreams, but the attention did little for CU’s reputation — especially among tuition-paying parents. Following a solid year of unflattering press, out-of-state enrollment plummeted, the Daily Camera reported last week. The incoming freshman class this fall dropped by 400 students compared to 2004, and to compensate, university officials have proposed an 11 percent tuition hike, according to the Camera report.

All of this is enough to make today’s grads wonder if their diplomas are worth the paper it is printed on. But just in time for graduation, good news arrives at last: The university this week was named one the top schools in the country for civic engagement and student activism, according to a university press release. A new book due out next month, Princeton Review's Colleges with a Conscience: 81 Great Schools with Outstanding Community Involvement, will honor CU, along side the nation’s top-tier institutions, for its social awareness and commmunity outreach efforts.

For a school accustomed to fielding negative attention, the nod brings a much-needed boost to the school's waning street cred, and is a sign the university is indeed on the mend. Today's grads can drink to that.

Steamy Sixth Graders

A debate over excessive displays of affection in one Boulder middle school has pitted students against school administrators, and administrators against local media.
The Daily Camera broke the story last Friday, reporting that administrators at Centennial Middle School in Boulder had decreed a new mandate: thou shalt not hug thy fellow students. Prompted by some sixth graders apparently steaming up the hallways with excessive embracing, assistant principal Becky Escamilla had suggested, according to the Camera, students and young lovers instead exercise a more civilized greeting: the high-five.
In response to Friday’s story, school principal Cheryl Scott dispatched that same day a letter to parents denying any such ban existed, claiming a no-hug policy was all just rumor started by students. The letter states Escamilla had in fact addressed each sixth grade class last Wednesday to discuss rising tardiness due to “lingering at lockers, walking each other to class, horseplay and long goodbye hugs.� Students, according to Scott, misconstrued that as a blanket ban against all hugging on school grounds, and the news that ricocheted through the school like wildfire. Fighting for their right, apparently, not to party, students on Thursday launched a grassroots campaign in the lunchroom, circulating a “Hugs, not Drugs� petition, according Scott.
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Preservation Row

It took just over an hour for the Boulder City Council last night to unanimously approve a plan to save one of the town’s most historic neighborhoods, one tiny century-old block of quintessential Boulder that managed, somehow, to survive intact as the rest of the city grew up big around it. In today's lead story, the Daily Camera reports the vote marks the first successful effort in granting any Boulder neighborhood protective status in several years.

The council’s decision to designate the 500 block of Marine Street a historical district—now called the Highland Lawn Historic District—ended a two-decade long battle waged by a small group of residents and local historical preservationists to protect one of Boulder’s oldest blocks from encroaching development.

It was a far less contentious effort compared to the Uni Hill affair that began in 2002, when residents fought hard and successfully against Historic Boulder, a private historical preservation non-profit that initiated a proposal—unknown to most residents—to grant the University Hill neighborhood historical district status. [more]

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